Truth is More Important Than Civility
Dartmouth University President Sian Beiloc takes a stand for "brave spaces”.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/truth-is-mo..._cid=ccb32418f3
February 29, 2024 by Bruce Thornton


Hamas’ savage attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 sparked “woke” leftist protests at prestigious universities. The protestors sided with the terrorists butchers, indulged antisemitic and genocidal chants and slogans, and threatened the well-being of Jewish students. Campus “cancel culture,” the silencing of dissenting opinions and ideas, ran amok.

Worse, many university administrators sided with what could only be described as “hate speech,” and refused to commit to a clear condemnation of the terrorists and their student cheerleaders. Instead, they relied on weasel words like “context” to avoid their students’ wrath. The First Amendment and academic freedom, long ailing in our premier universities, are now languishing on life-support.

One exception, however, was Dartmouth University. Its president, Sian Beiloc, has created the Dartmouth Dialogues program. “I don’t want safe spaces, I want brave spaces,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “The idea is to be around the brightest minds and to be pushed and to be a little uncomfortable. Even if you’re not going to change your mind, the ability to hone your arguments and to think differently from different perspectives, these are skills and tools of higher education.”

Universities have been so corrupted by “political correctness” and its “woke” iteration, that any university president who publicly acknowledges the importance of challenging students’ ideas and opinions is welcome. We need to encourage more academics to return to the traditions of liberal education before our heritage of political freedom and equality, under assault in this country for more than a century, descends further into despotism.

But we need more than just politely listening and pondering the “other side.” We must restore and strengthen the role of reasoned argument, empirical evidence, and truth as the premier arbiter of political opinions. These foundational metrics for evaluating political ideas and ideologies, however, have been deformed in our universities and replaced with various incoherent ideas like radical relativism and amoral utilitarianism.

For the truth is, there are defining differences between our country’s two major political ideologies that are more than just party loyalty, grubby self-interest, or the lust for material wealth and power. One faction––which supports our Constitutional limited government founded on the universal reality of innate human vulnerability to destructive passions––acknowledges tradition and common sense, the collective experiences of billions of human beings that over time and space provide evidence of human behavior and motivation.

The other faction is the ideal of endless progress and improvement brought about by “experts” trained in the “human sciences”––Stalin’s “engineers of the soul.” Such technocracies must concentrate and centralize power, and discredit all rivals, particularly family, faith, tradition, customs, and common sense that challenge the authority of the “managerial elite.” Only by discrediting and displacing these traditional authorities can the “guardians,” as Plato called them in his technocratic utopia, create heaven on earth.

Yet despite pretensions of “scientific” knowledge and rational debate, despite their Orwellian rhetoric of “social justice” and “equity,” the left’s ideologies are mere pretexts for seizing power and dominating others “by any means necessary.” Hence -- excerpt, rest at link above --